So much great television, so little binge time
Some of the best overlooked shows in a year with more than 500 new dramas alone
The ongoing lament of the professional TV watcher is that there is so little time to mine the plethora of riches to be binged.
With more than 500 new dramas this year alone, not to mention many more returning series, many interesting works have been overlooked.
One of my favourites this year that I never got to reviewing was HBO’s “The Deuce,” about the birth and legalization of the porn trade in the 1970s. It stars James Franco, playing twin brothers who open a bar near Times Square, and Golden Globe-nominated Maggie Gyllenhaal as a prostitute and would-be porn mogul.
This series could have gone epically wrong in tone — especially with the focus on nudity for both men and women — but it remains eminently watchable, thanks to David Simon’s (“The Wire”) realistic look at the inner workings of one of America’s greatest cultural exports.
The year, meanwhile, started off weird with Jude Law’s “The Young Pope,” about a young American priest who rises to the top job. It is an acid trip of a series, with blaring electronic music and fantastically framed surrealism as only Italian director Paola Sorrentino could pull off, and it speaks to the newfound confidence of television as a medium for art.
Similarly, “American Gods” took a comic book that seemed to be unadaptable and made it a darkly visual treat.
But my favourite overlooked weird show (and it wasn’t “Twin Peaks: The Return” or the final season of the brilliantly inventive “The Leftovers”) it was the FX’s series “Legion.”
I was already a fan of Noah Hawley’s “Fargo” series, but “Legion” allows him to play in the superhero league, on a much more fantastical plane where he excels. It is a Marvel series unlike anything else and redefines what a superhero show can be.
Beautifully art directed with Hawley’s carefully curated ’70s Day-Glo esthetic, it upends traditional ensemble fare such as “Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.,” which now looks disappointingly dated and formulaic in comparison.
It makes you wonder what Hawley might have done if he had the directing reins and budget of Marvel’s “Doctor Strange.”
Another favourite, although the joke ran on too long, is that truly demented experiment that could only be made in an era of try-it-all television: Amazon’s “Comrade Detective” starring Channing Tatum and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
The series is a send-up of Romanian Communist propaganda dubbed over in homage to films such as Woody Allen’s “What’s Up, Tiger Lily?” The parody runs stale over six episodes, but the examination of propaganda in an era of Trump makes it timely.
In terms of comedy, one show never failed to reel me in with its philosophical look at heaven and hell: NBC’s “The Good Place” starring Ted Danson and Kristen Bell, about dead people who can tell you more about life in their snappy oneliners than most dramas get to during a whole season.
The other show that quietly tugged at me, and perhaps didn’t get the notice it deserved, was the second season of Netflix’s “Master of None.” Here we follow Aziz Ansari on an Italian journey and romance straight out of “A Walk in the Clouds.”
It takes a meandering, comic path that leaves us in unexpected places. We don’t know where we’re going, but the ride is a taste of what all good television should deliver: delicious, bittersweet and thoughtprovoking.